Chapter 19: There Has to Be Someone

EELA — 2017

The plan came to her in the garden, on a Tuesday in January, while she was watching the jackal.

It had become a ritual — the evening vigil, the chair by the window, the wait. The jackal appeared most evenings at dusk, slipping through the gap in the garden wall with the fluid, unhurried movement of a creature that understood it was being watched and did not care. It would cross the lawn, pause at the neem tree, and disappear into the scrub on the far side. Sometimes it stopped and looked at the house. Sometimes it looked directly at Eela, and she would meet its eyes — amber, ancient, the eyes of something that existed outside the human calendar of grief and love and regret — and she would feel, briefly, the particular comfort of being acknowledged by a creature that expected nothing from her.

She was ninety-two. Her body, which had served her with reasonable competence for nine decades, was beginning to issue notices of termination. The heart — always the heart, always the organ that carried the most metaphorical weight and, it turned out, the most practical — was tired. Dr Kulkarni, who visited every fortnight, used words like valve and efficiency and managing expectations, and Eela listened politely and then made him chai and asked about his daughter's wedding, which was more interesting than her cardiac output and considerably less depressing.

She was not afraid of dying. She had been afraid of it once — in the war, when the bombers flew over and the ground shook and the Filter Room hummed with the particular tension of women who were tracking the instruments of their own possible destruction. But that fear had been specific, situational, the fear of dying now, dying violently, dying before. This was different. This was the fear of dying after — after a long life, after love and loss, after the accumulation of a story so dense and so tangled that no single person possessed the whole of it.

That was the problem. The story.

She had spent ninety-two years living it and seventy-five years writing it and the writing had produced seventeen journals, hundreds of sketches, thousands of marginal notes in books, and one annotated copy of Wuthering Heights that contained, between its pages, the only physical evidence of a love that had shaped two lives and destroyed neither.

Rajan knew part of the story. She had met him — finally, achingly, six years ago — and the meeting had been everything and nothing. Everything because he was there, alive, kind, her son. Nothing because six years of sporadic visits and careful conversations could not replace sixty-five years of absence. They talked. They drank chai. They discussed his work, his daughter, his wife. They did not discuss the things that mattered most — the war, Billu, the cottage, the love — because discussing them required a shared language they did not yet possess. The language of intimacy. The language of knowing someone's entire story, not just the polite, curated version.

She needed someone to carry the story. Not Rajan — he was too close to it, too embedded, too much a character in it to also be its narrator. Not Anita or Meera — they were family, and family, she had learned, was the worst audience for the truth because family had the most to lose from hearing it. Not Padma or Hetal — both dead now, Padma in 2009, Hetal in 2014, the Spinster Society reduced to a solo act.

She needed a stranger. A stranger who would come to the house and find the journals and read them and understand the story and carry it to Rajan — not as family, not as friend, but as witness. A neutral party. A translator between the living and the dead.

The jackal paused at the neem tree. It turned its head toward the house. Its amber eyes caught the last of the light.

'I need someone,' Eela said aloud. Moti, at her feet, raised her head. 'Not you, darling. Though you're very helpful. I need a person. A particular kind of person.'

She thought about what kind. A woman — she was certain of that. The story was a woman's story, and it required a woman's understanding. A woman who had loved and lost and survived the losing. A woman who understood that secrets were not weaknesses but shelters — places you built when the world was too much, places you eventually had to leave. A woman who was rebuilding.

She could not choose this woman. That was the crucial thing. She could not interview candidates or place advertisements or ask her solicitor to find someone suitable. The choosing had to be organic — the house had to choose, the way it had always chosen, the way old houses with strong foundations and complicated histories chose the people who belonged in them. She would sell the house with conditions. She would leave the journals where they could be found — some obvious, some hidden, the trail laid out like breadcrumbs in a forest. And she would trust that the person who followed the trail would be the right person.

It was mad. She knew it was mad. But she had spent her life doing the sensible thing — giving up her son was sensible, accepting Billu's letter was sensible, watching from hospital corridors was sensible — and the sensible thing had never led anywhere except to more silence.

'Madness it is,' she said to Moti. 'Let's do something completely mad.'

*

She spent the following months preparing.

The solicitor — Mr Joshi, a patient man who had handled the family's affairs for twenty years and who was accustomed to Eela's eccentricities — listened to her instructions with the careful attention of a professional who knew that questioning a ninety-two-year-old client's decisions was both futile and impolite.

'You want to sell the house with conditions,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Conditions that require the buyer to — let me make sure I have this right — to live in the house, to read the journals in the study, and to care for the dog.'

'And the garden. The garden is important.'

'And the garden.' He made a note. 'Mrs Chitale, may I ask — why?'

'Because the house has a story, Mr Joshi. And stories need readers. I cannot take the story with me when I go, and I cannot leave it behind without someone to receive it. The conditions ensure that the right person finds it.'

'With respect, the conditions don't ensure anything. They ensure that whoever buys the house will live in it and read some journals. They don't ensure that the person will — what? — understand them? Care about them?'

'No. But the house will take care of that.'

Mr Joshi regarded her with the expression of a man who had learned, over two decades, that some conversations with Eela Chitale were not worth pursuing to their logical conclusion. 'Very well. I'll draft the conditions. Anything else?'

'Yes. The price. Set it below market value. Significantly below. I want the house to be accessible — not a luxury purchase. I want the kind of buyer who is looking for a home, not an investment.'

'How far below market value?'

'Far enough that Mr Joshi raises his eyebrows.'

His eyebrows rose.

'Perfect,' said Eela.

*

She arranged the house with the care of a woman setting a stage. The journals went into the study — the earlier ones visible on the desk, the later ones in drawers, the most intimate ones in the loft, in crates that would require effort to open. The drawings went into the locked chest — the key hidden in the kitchen, in the tea caddy, where Hema had always hidden important things. The annotated Wuthering Heights went on the top shelf of the study, behind the encyclopaedias, where it would be found only by someone who was thorough enough to clear the shelf.

The birthday cards she placed in the loft with the christening robe and the silver rattle. The photographs she arranged in the study — some in frames, some loose, the picnic photograph placed face-down in a drawer where it would be found but not immediately, where its discovery would feel like an excavation rather than a presentation.

She wrote one final journal entry. The last. Seventeen volumes, seventy-five years, and this was the end — not the dramatic, climactic end of a novel but the quiet, practical end of a woman who had said everything she needed to say and was now saying goodbye.

January 15th, 2017.

The house is ready. The story is laid out. The trail is set. All that remains is the walker.

I do not know who she will be. I do not need to know. I trust the house. I trust the neem tree and the garden and the jackal and the dog. I trust the particular gravity of this place — the way it draws certain people in and holds them. The way it held me for sixty years. The way it held my parents before me. The way it will hold whoever comes next.

To the woman who reads this — and I am certain it will be a woman, though I cannot explain my certainty except to say that the house has always belonged to women, has always been shaped by women, has always kept its secrets for women to find — I want to say this:

The story you have found is mine. But it is also yours. Every woman who has loved too much, lost too much, kept too many secrets, will recognise herself in these pages. I wrote them for Rajan, but I wrote them also for you — whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever brought you to this house.

Read them. Understand them. And then do what I could not do: tell the truth. Not to the world — the world does not need our truths; it has enough of its own. But to the people who matter. To the son who is waiting. To the love you have been carrying. To yourself.

The fear of being found out is worse than the finding out. I know this now. I wish I had known it sooner. I wish I had been braver. But wishing is the one luxury I can no longer afford, and so I will say instead: be brave for me. Be braver than I was. Tell the truth that I spent my life hiding, and let the truth do what truth does — which is to set you free, and to hurt like hell, and to be, in the end, the only thing that matters.

I am sitting in my chair. Moti is at my feet. The jackal is at the wall. The neem tree is still. The chai is growing cold. The garden is dark.

I am hopeful.

*

She put down the pen. She closed the journal. She placed it in the study, on the desk, open to the first page — the page from 1942, the page that began: arrived at Lohegaon today. Heat extraordinary. Met a woman named Mohini Kamat who calls herself Billu. I think we are going to be friends.

She returned to the breakfast room. She sat in her chair. Moti settled at her feet with the sigh of a dog that had learned to read the rhythm of its person's days and knew that this was the quiet time, the sitting time, the time when the woman in the chair looked out at the garden and thought thoughts that the dog could not share but could accompany.

The light faded. The garden darkened. The neem tree became a silhouette. And at the wall, the jackal appeared — slipping through the gap with that fluid, unhurried grace, crossing the lawn, pausing at the tree.

It looked at her.

She looked at it.

'There has to be someone,' she said. 'There will be someone. The house will find her.'

The jackal held her gaze for a long moment. Then it turned and trotted across the lawn and disappeared into the scrub, and the garden was empty, and the house was quiet, and Eela Chitale sat in her chair and watched the dark and waited for the someone who would come.

She did not have to wait long. But she did not know that. She only knew the waiting, and the hope, and the particular peace of a woman who had done everything she could and was now, at last, willing to let go.